DOCSLIB.ORG

Unisonance in Kung Fu Film Music, Or the Wong Fei-Hung Theme Song As a Cantonese Transnational Anthem

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Unisonance in Kung Fu Film Music, Or the Wong Fei-Hung Theme Song As a Cantonese Transnational Anthem UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem Author(s) McGuire, Colin P. Publication date 2018-05-04 Original citation McGuire, C. P. (2018) 'Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem', Ethnomusicology Forum, 27(1), pp. 48-67. doi: 10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 Type of publication Article (peer-reviewed) Link to publisher's https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/17411912.2018.1463 version 549 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 Access to the full text of the published version may require a subscription. Rights © 2018 The Author. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/6619 from Downloaded on 2021-10-10T17:37:44Z Ethnomusicology Forum ISSN: 1741-1912 (Print) 1741-1920 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/remf20 Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei- hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem Colin P. McGuire To cite this article: Colin P. McGuire (2018) Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei- hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem, Ethnomusicology Forum, 27:1, 48-67, DOI: 10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 04 May 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 326 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=remf20 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 2018, VOL. 27, NO. 1, 48–67 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2018.1463549 Unisonance in kung fu film music, or the Wong Fei-hung theme song as a Cantonese transnational anthem Colin P. McGuire Department of Music, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Wong Fei-hung was a Cantonese martial arts master from southern Anthems; unisonance; China who became associated with a melody called ‘General’s Ode’. transnations; diasporas; Since the 1950s, over 100 Hong Kong movies and television shows nationalism; imagined have forged the link by using this melody as Master Wong’s theme. communities; music and martial arts; kung fu movies; During fieldwork in a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I observed Hong Kong cinema; Wong several consultants claiming this piece as a Cantonese national Fei-hung; Huang Feihong; anthem—a hymn for a nation without a sovereign state. Virtual Once Upon a Time in China; ethnography conducted online showed that this opinion is held Cantonese more widely, but that the piece also inspires broader Chinese nationalist sentiment. My analysis of speech-tone relationships to melodic contour in Cantonese and Mandarin versions of the song, however, has revealed a tight integration with the former that the latter lacked. By sharpening Anderson’s concept of unisonance, I explore how this song has become an unofficial transnational anthem for Cantonese people, arguing that Master Wong’s theme auralises an abstract sense of imagined community. Introduction A national anthem is a nation-state’s official musical symbol, but music may also achieve unofficial anthem status for nations that precede, rupture, exceed and transgress the see- mingly stable territories and borders of states. This fraught situation highlights that the word nation can refer not only to a sovereign nation-state, but also a community of people who share a common cultural, ethnic, linguistic, historical and/or geographic iden- tity, without necessarily having an autonomous state of its own. In reference to the latter sense, I draw from post-colonial studies to think of transnations as cosmopolitan social groups whose ‘patriotism could become plural, serial, contextual, and mobile’ (Appadurai 1993: 428), and to recognise that their flexible being-in-the-world cuts across, around and through citizenship-based ideas of nationality (Ashcroft 2010). In so doing, I nuance Ben- edict Anderson’s([1983] 2006) imagined communities to extend past the nationalism of bounded sovereign territories. Herein, I aim to sharpen Anderson’s concept of unisonance, referring to the collectivistic feeling experienced by people hearing and/or singing a national CONTACT Colin P. McGuire [email protected] Department of Music, University College Cork, Music Building, Sunday’s Well Road, Cork T23 HF50, Ireland © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FORUM 49 anthem ([1983] 2006:132–3), in order to use it as an ethnomusicological tool. This article is an investigation of unofficial anthems as aural signs of transnations. My case study focuses on Cantonese people [大粵人],1 whose homeland centres on southern China’s Guangdong Province, extending to eastern Guangxi Autonomous Region, northern Vietnam, Hong Kong and Macau. They speak dialects of Yue Chinese [粵語], of which Cantonese [廣洲話]2 is the prestige variant associated with Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. With a global population of approximately 73 million speakers, Yue/Cantonese has comparable numbers to French, Turkish and Vietnamese.3 The Can- tonese diaspora is large and global. Cantonese people are a prime example of a transnation because of how their imagined community crosses both internal constituencies of the Chinese state and international borders. Their transnational imaginary is evidenced by numerous websites, blogs and Facebook pages espousing an aspirational Republic of Can- tonia [大粵民國]. In this article, I argue that Cantonese people feel unisonance when hearing a version of the melody ‘General’sOde’ [〈將軍令〉],4 which catalyses the song’s associations with martial virtue and patriotism, allowing it to be experienced as an unofficial transnational anthem. This unisonant, anthemic experience is intrinsically connected to Hong Kong cinema’s long-time use of the piece as a theme song for a nineteenth/twentieth-century southern Chinese martial arts folk hero named Wong Fei-hung [黃飛鴻].5 While many film and cultural studies scholars have taken an interest in Wong Fei-Hung (e.g., Li 2001;Lo1993;Po2012; Rodriguez 1997; Williams 2000), only two music researchers have published on these movies. Their work provides a history of the theme song’s con- nection with Master Wong (Yu Siu-wah 2012, 2013) and an interpretation of intertextual Chinese masculinity in Wong Fei-hung film music (Weng 2014), but there remains a lacuna surrounding the song’s broader cultural importance. Hong Kong kung fu movies have a global following; however, it is among Cantonese people that Master Wong and his song have become institutions, spanning generations of audiences in over 100 pro- ductions since the 1950s. Wong Fei-hung’s righteous martial arts ethos of resistance to domination empowers his theme music. I contend that the tune’s enduring popularity is tied to issues of abstract national pride, pointing to Cantonese ambivalence about China as a modern nation-state. Hong Kong is the de facto capital of a global transnation, serving as the hub of what historian Henry Yu (2013) calls the Cantonese Pacific. After Hong Kong was ceded to Britain following the first Opium War in 1842, it grew from a collection of fishing villages 1I use English translations wherever possible to make the text more legible for people who do not know Chinese. In cases where a common romanisation already exists, I defer to convention. As necessary, I also give Chinese characters. My choice to avoid Standard Chinese (aka Mandarin, Putonghua or Guoyu) for transliterating into English is consciously sub- versive, intervening in hegemonic language politics. At the same time, people who know Chinese will be able to read the characters in whatever dialect they please. 2Historically, both Guangdong Province and its capital Guangzhou have been referred to in English as Canton, and the word Cantonese is thus shared between people and languages from that area. There is no English translation for the Chinese expression covering the broader Yue people, and so I use ‘Cantonese’ as the nearest equivalent. 3Estimates by Ethnologue: https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size (accessed 13 June 2017). Heritage language loss is common in diasporic groups, so the worldwide number of ethnically Cantonese people is probably larger than the number of speakers, but harder to document. 4As I will discuss later, the title ‘General’s Ode’ applies to a tune family with many versions and variants but is also used for several unrelated pieces. 5Romanised Chinese names are provided in the typical Chinese order (surname first), as are those written in Chinese char- acters. People with a non-Chinese given name are presented in the standard English order (surname last). 50 C. P. MCGUIRE to become a cosmopolitan city of seven million people, fuelled primarily by migration from Guangdong. It is thus a site of local diaspora. The main ports for early emigration from China were Hong Kong and Macau in Guangdong Province, as well as Xiamen in neighbouring Fujian Province, establishing a global Chinese diaspora over a century of migration that began in the 1850s.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • CHAPTER 3 Hong Kong Music Ecosphere
    Abstract The people of Hong Kong experienced their deepest sense of insecurity and anxiety after the handover of sovereignty to Beijing. Time and again, the incapacity and lack of credibility of the SAR government has been manifested in various new policies or incidents. Hong Kong people’s anger and discontent with the government have reached to the peak. On July 1, 2003, the sixth anniversary of the hand-over of Hong Kong to China, 500,000 demonstrators poured through the streets of Hong Kong to voice their concerns over the proposed legislation of Article 23 and their dissatisfaction to the SAR government. And the studies of politics and social movement are still dominated by accounts of open confrontations in the form of large scale and organized rebellions and protests. If we shift our focus on the terrain of everyday life, we can find that the youth voice out their discontents by different ways, such as various kinds of media. This research aims to fill the gap and explore the relationship between popular culture and politics of the youth in Hong Kong after 1997 by using one of the local bands KingLyChee as a case study. Politically, it aims at discovering the hidden voices of the youth and argues that the youth are not seen as passive victims of structural factors such as education system, market and family. Rather they are active and strategic actors who are capable of negotiating with and responding to the social change of Hong Kong society via employing popular culture like music by which the youth obtain their pleasure of producing their own meanings of social experience and the pleasure of avoiding the social discipline of the power-bloc.
    [Show full text]
  • Paper Number: 63 May 2007 Before and After the Fall: Mapping Hong
    Paper Number: 63 May 2007 Before and after the Fall: Mapping Hong Kong Cantopop in the Global Era Stephen Yiu-wai Chu Hong Kong Baptist University The author welcome comments from readers. Contact details: Stephen Yiu-wai Chu, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Email: [email protected] David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI) Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) LEWI Working Paper Series is an endeavour of David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), a consortium with 28 member universities, to foster dialogue among scholars in the field of East-West studies. Globalisation has multiplied and accelerated inter-cultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religious encounters, intentionally or not. In a world where time and place are increasingly compressed and interaction between East and West grows in density, numbers, and spread, East-West studies has gained a renewed mandate. LEWI’s Working Paper Series provides a forum for the speedy and informal exchange of ideas, as scholars and academic institutions attempt to grapple with issues of an inter-cultural and global nature. Circulation of this series is free of charge. Comments should be addressed directly to authors. Abstracts of papers can be downloaded from the LEWI web page at http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~lewi/publications.html. Manuscript Submission: Scholars in East-West studies at member universities who are interested in submitting a paper for publication should send an article manuscript, preferably in a Word file via e-mail, as well as a submission form (available online) to the Series Secretary at the address below.
    [Show full text]
  • Warriors As the Feminised Other
    Warriors as the Feminised Other The study of male heroes in Chinese action cinema from 2000 to 2009 A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Studies at the University of Canterbury by Yunxiang Chen University of Canterbury 2011 i Abstract ―Flowery boys‖ (花样少年) – when this phrase is applied to attractive young men it is now often considered as a compliment. This research sets out to study the feminisation phenomena in the representation of warriors in Chinese language films from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China made in the first decade of the new millennium (2000-2009), as these three regions are now often packaged together as a pan-unity of the Chinese cultural realm. The foci of this study are on the investigations of the warriors as the feminised Other from two aspects: their bodies as spectacles and the manifestation of feminine characteristics in the male warriors. This study aims to detect what lies underneath the beautiful masquerade of the warriors as the Other through comprehensive analyses of the representations of feminised warriors and comparison with their female counterparts. It aims to test the hypothesis that gender identities are inventory categories transformed by and with changing historical context. Simultaneously, it is a project to study how Chinese traditional values and postmodern metrosexual culture interacted to formulate Chinese contemporary masculinity. It is also a project to search for a cultural nationalism presented in these films with the examination of gender politics hidden in these feminisation phenomena. With Laura Mulvey‘s theory of the gaze as a starting point, this research reconsiders the power relationship between the viewing subject and the spectacle to study the possibility of multiple gaze as well as the power of spectacle.
    [Show full text]
  • Language Contact in Nanning: Nanning Pinghua and Nanning Cantonese
    20140303 draft of : de Sousa, Hilário. 2015a. Language contact in Nanning: Nanning Pinghua and Nanning Cantonese. In Chappell, Hilary (ed.), Diversity in Sinitic languages, 157–189. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Do not quote or cite this draft. LANGUAGE CONTACT IN NANNING — FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF NANNING PINGHUA AND NANNING CANTONESE1 Hilário de Sousa Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, École des hautes études en sciences sociales — ERC SINOTYPE project 1 Various topics discussed in this paper formed the body of talks given at the following conferences: Syntax of the World’s Languages IV, Dynamique du Langage, CNRS & Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2010; Humanities of the Lesser-Known — New Directions in the Descriptions, Documentation, and Typology of Endangered Languages and Musics, Lunds Universitet, 2010; 第五屆漢語方言語法國際研討會 [The Fifth International Conference on the Grammar of Chinese Dialects], 上海大学 Shanghai University, 2010; Southeast Asian Linguistics Society Conference 21, Kasetsart University, 2011; and Workshop on Ecology, Population Movements, and Language Diversity, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2011. I would like to thank the conference organizers, and all who attended my talks and provided me with valuable comments. I would also like to thank all of my Nanning Pinghua informants, my main informant 梁世華 lɛŋ11 ɬi55wa11/ Liáng Shìhuá in particular, for teaching me their language(s). I have learnt a great deal from all the linguists that I met in Guangxi, 林亦 Lín Yì and 覃鳳餘 Qín Fèngyú of Guangxi University in particular. My colleagues have given me much comments and support; I would like to thank all of them, our director, Prof. Hilary Chappell, in particular. Errors are my own.
    [Show full text]
  • Award-Winning Hong Kong Film Gallants to Premiere at Hong Kong
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Award-winning Hong Kong film Gallants to premiere at Hong Kong Film Festival 2011 in Singapore One-week festival to feature a total of 10 titles including four new and four iconic 1990s Hong Kong films of action and romance comedy genres Singapore, 30 June 2011 – Movie-goers can look forward to a retro spin at the upcoming Hong Kong Film Festival 2011 (HKFF 2011) to be held from 14 to 20 July 2011 at Cathay Cineleisure Orchard. A winner of multiple awards at the Hong Kong Film Awards 2011, Gallants, will premiere at HKFF 2011. The action comedy film will take the audience down the memory lane of classic kung fu movies. Other new Hong Kong films to premiere at the festival include action drama Rebellion, youthful romance Breakup Club and Give Love. They are joined by retrospective titles - Swordsman II, Once Upon A Time in China II, A Chinese Odyssey: Pandora’s Box and All’s Well, Ends Well. Adding variety to the lineup is Quattro Hong Kong I and II, comprising a total of eight short films by renowned Hong Kong and Asian filmmakers commissioned by Brand Hong Kong and produced by the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society. The retrospective titles were selected in a voting exercise that took place via Facebook and SMS in May. Public were asked to select from a list of iconic 1990s Hong Kong films that they would like to catch on the big screen again. The list was nominated by three invited panelists, namely Randy Ang, local filmmaker; Wayne Lim, film reviewer for UW magazine; and Kenneth Kong, film reviewer for Radio 100.3.
    [Show full text]
  • Written & Directed by and Starring Stephen Chow
    CJ7 Written & Directed by and Starring Stephen Chow East Coast Publicity West Coast Publicity Distributor IHOP Public Relations Block Korenbrot PR Sony Pictures Classics Jeff Hill Melody Korenbrot Carmelo Pirrone Jessica Uzzan Judy Chang Leila Guenancia 853 7th Ave, 3C 110 S. Fairfax Ave, #310 550 Madison Ave New York, NY 10019 Los Angeles, CA 90036 New York, NY 10022 212-265-4373 tel 323-634-7001 tel 212-833-8833 tel 212-247-2948 fax 323-634-7030 fax 212-833-8844 fax 1 Short Synopsis: From Stephen Chow, the director and star of Kung Fu Hustle, comes CJ7, a new comedy featuring Chow’s trademark slapstick antics. Ti (Stephen Chow) is a poor father who works all day, everyday at a construction site to make sure his son Dicky Chow (Xu Jian) can attend an elite private school. Despite his father’s good intentions to give his son the opportunities he never had, Dicky, with his dirty and tattered clothes and none of the “cool” toys stands out from his schoolmates like a sore thumb. Ti can’t afford to buy Dicky any expensive toys and goes to the best place he knows to get new stuff for Dicky – the junk yard! While out “shopping” for a new toy for his son, Ti finds a mysterious orb and brings it home for Dicky to play with. To his surprise and disbelief, the orb reveals itself to Dicky as a bizarre “pet” with extraordinary powers. Armed with his “CJ7” Dicky seizes this chance to overcome his poor background and shabby clothes and impress his fellow schoolmates for the first time in his life.
    [Show full text]
  • Peer Reviewed Title: Critical Han Studies: the History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority Author: Mullaney, Thoma
    Peer Reviewed Title: Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority Author: Mullaney, Thomas S. Leibold, James Gros, Stéphane Vanden Bussche, Eric Editor: Mullaney, Thomas S.; Leibold, James; Gros, Stéphane; Vanden Bussche, Eric Publication Date: 02-15-2012 Series: GAIA Books Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/07s1h1rf Keywords: Han, Critical race studies, Ethnicity, Identity Abstract: Addressing the problem of the ‘Han’ ethnos from a variety of relevant perspectives—historical, geographical, racial, political, literary, anthropological, and linguistic—Critical Han Studies offers a responsible, informative deconstruction of this monumental yet murky category. It is certain to have an enormous impact on the entire field of China studies.” Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania “This deeply historical, multidisciplinary volume consistently and fruitfully employs insights from critical race and whiteness studies in a new arena. In doing so it illuminates brightly how and when ideas about race and ethnicity change in the service of shifting configurations of power.” David Roediger, author of How Race Survived U.S. History “A great book. By examining the social construction of hierarchy in China,Critical Han Studiessheds light on broad issues of cultural dominance and in-group favoritism.” Richard Delgado, author of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction “A powerful, probing account of the idea of the ‘Han Chinese’—that deceptive category which, like ‘American,’ is so often presented as a natural default, even though it really is of recent vintage. A feast for both Sinologists and comparativists everywhere.” Magnus Fiskesjö, Cornell University eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.
    [Show full text]
  • Cultural Governance in Contemporary China: Popular Culture, Digital Technology, and the State
    ! ! ! ! CULTURAL GOVERNANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA: POPULAR CULTURE, DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, AND THE STATE BY LUZHOU LI DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communications and Media in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Emeritus John Nerone, Chair Assistant Professor Amanda Ciafone Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller Professor Kent Ono, University of Utah ii ABSTRACT This dissertation is a study of the historical formation and transformation of the Chinese online audiovisual industry under forces of strategic political calculations, expanding market relations, and growing social participation, and the cultural ramifications of this process, especially the kind of transformations digital technologies have wrought on the state-TV-station-centered mode of cultural production/distribution and regulatory apparatuses. Through this case, the project aims to theorize the changing mode of cultural governance of post-socialist regimes in the context of digital capitalism. Using mixed methods of documentary research, interviews with industry practitioners, participant observations of trade fairs/festivals, and critical discourse analyses of popular cultural texts, the study finds that the traditional broadcasting and the online video sectors are structured along two different political economic mechanisms. While the former is dominated by domestic capital and heavily regulated by state agencies, the latter is supported by transnational capital and less regulated. Digital technologies coupled with transnational capital thus generate new cultural flows, processes, and practices, which produces a heterogeneous and contested cultural sphere in the digital environment that substantially differs from the one created by traditional television.
    [Show full text]
  • Three Cases in China on Hakka Identity and Self-Perception
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives Three cases in China on Hakka identity and self-perception Ricky Heggheim Master’s Thesis in Chinese Studie KIN 4592, 30 Sp Departement of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages University of Oslo 1 Summary Study of Hakka culture has been an academic field for only a century. Compare with many other studies on ethnic groups in China, Hakka study and research is still in her early childhood. This despite Hakka is one of the longest existing groups of people in China. Uncertainty within the ethnicity and origin of Hakka people are among the topics that will be discussed in the following chapters. This thesis intends to give an introduction in the nature and origin of Hakka identity and to figure out whether it can be concluded that Hakka identity is fluid and depending on situations and surroundings. In that case, when do the Hakka people consider themselves as Han Chinese and when do they consider themselves as Hakka? And what are the reasons for this fluidness? Three cases in China serve as the foundation for this text. By exploring three different areas where Hakka people are settled, I hope this text can shed a light on the reasons and nature of changes in identity for Hakka people and their ethnic consciousness as well as the diversities and sameness within Hakka people in various settings and environments Conclusions that are given here indicate that Hakka people in different regions do varies in large degree when it comes to consciousness of their ethnicity and background.
    [Show full text]
  • Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies
    chinese cinema and transnational six film studies yingjin zhang Since the late 1980s, scholars have become more and more aware that the national cinema paradigm does not adequately respond to contemporary issues in film studies and film practices. Admittedly, even the concept of “national cinema” itself has proven to be far from unproblematic, and many scholars have advocated a shift from national cinema to “the national” of a cinema—a shift that allows for diversity and flexibility rather than unity and fixity, as previously conceived. However, as the forces of transna tion - alism assume increasing magnitude in the era of globalization, the national a; Newman, Kathleen E., Jan 10, 2009, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives š as a new critical concept continues to be unstable, and its conceptual space is constantly criss-crossed by other discourses and practices variously described as “international,” “multinational,” “postnational,” “para n a - tional” and, last but not least, “transnational.” This chapter attempts to reconceptualize Chinese cinema in relation to © Durovicová, Nata Taylor and Francis, Florence, ISBN: 9780203882795 the shifting problematics of national cinema and transnational film studies, in both theoretical and historical contexts. In terms of theory, we can no longer pretend to ignore glaring gaps and blind spots in film history previously covered up or glossed over by the national cinema paradigm. In terms of history, we must revisit the existing framework of film historiography and reevaluate certain disjunctures or ruptures in a century of Chinese film production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. This combined theoretical-historical perspective seeks to better comprehend Chinese cinema at a juncture when it has evidently outgrown the national cinema parameters and has emerged as a significant force in world cinema in the era of globalization and transnationalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Written at the Service of Oral: Topolect Literature Movement in Hong Kong* Yu
    2020 ВЕСТНИК САНКТ-ПЕТЕРБУРГСКОГО УНИВЕРСИТЕТА Т. 12. Вып. 3 ВОСТОКОВЕДЕНИЕ И АФРИКАНИСТИКА ГЕОКУЛЬТУРНЫЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВА И КОДЫ КУЛЬТУР СТРАН АЗИИ И АФРИКИ UDC 811.581.12 Written at the Service of Oral: Topolect Literature Movement in Hong Kong* Yu. A. Dreyzis Lomonosov Moscow State University, 1, Leninskie gory, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation For citation: Dreyzis Yu. A. Written at the Service of Oral: Topolect Literature Movement in Hong Kong. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, pp. 415– 425. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2020.307 The article describes the history of the Topolect Literature Movement (TLM), which devel- oped in Hong Kong in the 1940s, and analyzes its typological features. TLM was one of the most radical projects implemented to replace writing in the national standard language based on northern dialects with writing in the local language variety (Cantonese / Yue). This variety was a non-northern idiom that performed the function of the L-language in diglossia. TLM authors did not try to break the connection between the written language and its oral form: many, primarily poetic, texts were somehow intended for public performance; in other types of texts, a close connection with the spoken language was supported by the strong presence of a narrator. Texts were recorded using Chinese characters (a standard character with an identical / similar reading was used to write down a topolect morpheme, or a character using it as a phonetic element indicating reading was created). The final failure of TLM, in addi- tion to purely political factors, can be explained by a shift in attention from the urban literate audience to peasants.
    [Show full text]
  • Information to Users
    INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper aligmnent can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing firom left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Com pany 300 Norifi Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313.'761-4700 800.'521-0600 Order Number 9411999 Comparative, diachronic and experimental perspectives on the interaction between tone and vowel in Standard Cantonese Lee, Gina Maureen, Ph.D.
    [Show full text]